Shifrinson, Sarkar Receive Grant for Policy and Security Initiative
Joshua Shifrinson and Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professors of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, recently received a grant from the Charles Koch Foundation to establish a Policy and Security Initiative (PSI) at the Pardee School.
The PSI will help build upon BU’s existing strengths in policy, security, and diplomatic history. During the upcoming school year, the PSI will host two colloquia (one during the fall semester, one during the spring semester) that will bring BU researchers together with experts from the broader IR/security/history community to consider what conventional wisdoms in the policy and academic spaces need updating in light of new historical findings and theoretical insights.
Tentatively, the fall colloquium will focus on new research on nuclear affairs, while the spring colloquium will explore the relationship between the United States, NATO and Europe.
In addition to the colloquia, the PSI will also provide faculty and student research seed grants to support faculty and student research that utilizes history and/or theory in sophisticated ways to evaluate underlying assumptions, approaches, and understandings in the international security policy arena. A call for proposal for these grants will soon be issued.
Through these grants, the PSI seeks to engage and build upon the Pardee School’s and Boston University’s existing strengths at the theory-history-policy nexus. The grants will also lead to a series of “Policy Update” briefs — short (1000-1500 word) reports that see faculty and students discuss what their research means for the policy world.
Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson’s teaching and research interests focus on the intersection of international security and diplomatic history, particularly the rise and fall of great powers and the origins of grand strategy. He has special expertise in great power politics since 1945 and U.S. engagement in Europe and Asia. Shifrinson’s first book, Rising Titans, Falling Giants: How Great Powers Exploit Power Shifts (Cornell University Press, 2018) builds on extensive archival research focused on U.S. and Soviet foreign policy after 1945 to explain why some rising states challenge and prey upon declining great powers, while others seek to support and cooperate with declining states.
Jayita Sarkar, an historian by training, is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. Her expertise is in the history of U.S. foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, the global Cold War, South Asia and Western Europe. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Cold War History, International History Review, and elsewhere. Dr. Sarkar has held fellowships at MIT, Harvard, Columbia and Yale universities, and obtained a doctorate in International History from the Graduate Institute Geneva in Switzerland.